The recording captures the score from the limited-run summer 2015 production at the Segal Centre in Montreal. Book and lyrics are by David Spencer. Music is by Alan Menken. The cast is led by Ken James Stewart.

Lyrics are by Spencer, who also wrote the show a new libretto. Spencer and Menken collaborated on the Off-Broadway musical Weird Romance.

The producers have made a track from the recording available exclusively to Playbill.com readers. It’s “I’m Gonna Buy This Lake”:

Watch the previously released trailer:

Stewart played the title role, with George Masswohl as Max Kravitz and Montreal’s Marie-Pierre de Brienne as Duddy’s love interest, Yvette.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is based on Richler’s novel of the same name, published in 1959. It was adapted as a film, starring Richard Dreyfuss, in 1974.

Menken wrote the first version of the score for Duddy between Little Shop of Horrors and Little Mermaid. The musical was first presented in Philadelphia as part of the 1987 American Music Theatre Festival, but did not continue on to Broadway. Menken and Spencer continued to work on it after the Philadelphia production. It now has a completely new libretto by Spencer.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a morality tale about a young man in 1950s Montreal, from the working class Jewish inner city, desperate to make his mark and prove himself to his family and community. Told by his grandfather that "a man without land is nobody," he launches into a series of schemes and enterprises aimed at acquiring and developing a lakefront property. Often his compulsive ambition is at odds with better judgment and threatens his relationships with those who love him, among them a French Canadian girl he meets while working at a summer resort; and yet he is as likely to come to the rescue of those he loves in just as aggressive and subversive a manner. This duality is at the center of a journey in which 19-year-old Duddy, on the cusp of manhood, must finally, ultimately, decide what kind of man he's going to be.

Spencer told Playbill.com that he has rewritten the show from the ground up, with “a handful” of songs remaining from the Philadelphia version, “and most of those altered in shape. Quite literally, and in every practical and artistic sense, the Philadelphia version had become another show with the same title.”

Spencer said he has stuck with the show for all these years because “it’s one of those rare stories that get under your skin and speak to you and your sensibility at a gut level, such that you have to work on it. And we’ve never doubted how special the show is. In spite of everything, putting Duddy Kravitz in the drawer and walking away was never an option.”